from the not-how-it-works dept

The legacy recording industry continues to seek any possible way to force people to pay, now that many people see no reason to continue to fork over money to the old gatekeepers. After years of seeking increasing "you must be a criminal" levies on hard drives, blank CDs and other media, there has been a more recent focus on just trying to get broadband access providers to add a "piracy tax" to all internet connections. Over in Belgium, the collection society SABAM has been leading this charge. Back in 2011, it suddenly started demanding 3.4% of all internet connection fees from ISPs in Belgium. When the broadband providers refused to just pay up, SABAM sued in 2013. And it's not going particularly well. The court has now rejected SABAM's claims, noting (correctly) that internet access providers are mere conduits and shouldn't have to pay for the actions of their users.

This is the right decision, though there's a decent chance that SABAM will appeal. Either way, this shows the incredible entitlement felt by some in the industry. They feel that if people no longer want to pay them, that everyone should be forced to pay. That's really quite incredible when you think about it. In most businesses, if customers are no longer interested in buying what you're selling at the price you're offering, you have to learn to adapt. But the legacy recording industry still seems to think the problem is with the public, rather than with its own business model.

the Belgian government's FPS Economy (Federal Public Service Economy) agency, which has regulatory power, believes that Sabam is wrongly asking providers for compensation, said Chantal De Pauw, an agency spokeswoman.

While the FPS opposes any kind of illegal downloading, Sabam's solution penalizes Internet users and this is against the E.U.'s e-commerce directive, according to the authority. Providing Internet access is not the same as publishing protected works, the FPS said in a news release, adding that there are other ways to fight illegal downloads than posing levies on ISPs.

Even more dramatically, FPS is taking legal action against SABAM to stop it proceeding with its own lawsuit:

The FPS has ordered Sabam to stop its lawsuit, but the association has argued that they are operating within the bounds of the law, said De Pauw. FPS has therefore decided to sue Sabam in October to force it to stop its legal procedures against the ISPs, De Pauw said. If FPS wins the suit, Sabam faces penalties of up to €100,000 (US$137,600) per day if it continues its quest, she added.

SABAM has always been frustratingly out-of-touch with reality in its demands, but now that it is being sued by its own government, perhaps it will finally take the hint and drop its ridiculous and unjustified scheme.

from the clutching-at-straws dept

Back in November 2011, we wrote about the Belgian music royalty collection agency SABAM's demand for 3.4% of Internet subscriber fees as "compensation" for online piracy in Belgium. As Tim Cushing explained back then, this was ridiculous on just about every level. But SABAM doesn't let little things like that get in the way of its desperate attempt to avoid moving with the times and coming up with new business models. So after failing dismally to convince Europe's highest court that it could force ISPs to spy on their customers, SABAM has now moved on to suing ISPs instead, as TorrentFreak reports:

This week SABAM sued the Belgian ISPs Belgacom, Telenet and Voo, claiming a 3.4 percent cut of Internet subscriber fees as compensation for the rampant piracy they enable through their networks.

SABAM argues that authors should be paid for any "public broadcast" of a song. Pirated downloads and streams on the Internet are such public broadcasts according to the group, and they are therefore entitled to proper compensation.

One of the ISPs being sued, Belgacom, has a better analogy for what's going on here:

"A postman doesn't open letters he delivers. We are also just transporting data, and we are not responsible for the contents," Belgacom says.

That's the "mere conduit" principle, and as TorrentFreak points out, if that defense is overturned here, and the "piracy license" is imposed, the cost will inevitably be passed on to users, which means that people who buy music legally will be paying twice for the privilege. And of course, it wouldn't just be SABAM: the other copyright industries -- films, books, photos, software, games -- will doubtless all line up for their free handout, making online access prohibitively expensive in Belgium.

Perhaps surprisingly, our results present no evidence of digital music sales displacement. While we find important cross country differences in the effects of downloading on music purchases, our findings suggest a rather small complementarity between these two music consumption channels. It seems that the majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them. The complementarity effect of online streaming is found to be somewhat larger, suggesting a stimulating effect of this activity on the sales of digital music.

That is, streaming sites might even promote digital music sales; so maybe SABAM should be giving money to the ISPs, not asking for it....

from the are-there-no-limits? dept

If there's a common trait of the various rightsholders groups around the world, it is their sense of entitlement. If anyone does anything with a work under copyright, they feel they have a right to regulate it and be paid for it. A good example is the claim by the Authors Guild that owners of Kindles weren't allowed to use an experimental text-to-speech feature, since that would infringe on the entirely made up concept of "audio rights" -- and hence, presumably, require further payment.

Twice a month, the library in [the Belgian town of] Dilbeek welcomes about 10 children to introduce them to the magical world of books. A representative of the library in question is quoted in the De Morgen report as saying there’s no budget to compensate people who read to the kids, relying instead on volunteers (bless them).

SABAM got in touch with the library to let them know that it thinks this is unacceptable, however, and that they should start coughing up cash for reading stories from copyrighted books out loud. The library rep calculates that it could cost them roughly 250 euros (which is about $328) per year to pay SABAM for the right to -- again -- READ BOOKS TO KIDS.

It's worth emphasizing that these are volunteers, so this is in no sense a professional "performance". It's just public-spirited people generously doing exactly what parents do when reading to their own children. Indeed, it's not hard to imagine SABAM trying to claim money for that too, one day.

Of course, if SABAM refuses to back down here, the likely outcome will be that many libraries throughout Belgium will cancel these reading sessions for children. As a result, fewer young people will be introduced to the world of reading, fewer of them will grow up to be readers, and writers will have fewer fans and less money. In other words, SABAM's attempt to extend its reach to new areas will harm not only children -- about whom it is obviously indifferent -- but also the very people it purports to serve.

from the funny-how-that-works dept

The Belgian anti-piracy group, SABAM, has been one of the most aggressive anti-piracy groups out there. The group recently lost two huge court cases in which it tried to get courts to force ISPs and hosting firms to put in place filters to stop infringement. Perhaps more controversially, the organization has tried to require social networks to pay a flat fee for all the infringement happening on their networks. A year ago, there was a story of SABAM taking cash for a band they didn't represent after a TV show played a "joke" on the group.

However, in what appears not to be a joke, it looks like SABAM and some of its execs are facing some pretty serious charges, including "falsifying accounts to cover up bribe payments, abuse of trust, copyright fraud and embezzlement," according to TorrentFreak. Apparently, according to the charges, SABAM wasn't very good at actually distributing the money it was supposed to distribute to artists. Things to keep in mind every time one of these groups insists it's looking out for the interests of artists...

from the good-news dept

A few months back we noted that the European Court of Justice had ruled that ISPs couldn't be required to set up a filtering system designed to catch copyright infringement. The case involved Belgian anti-piracy organization/collection agency SABAM, which had demanded that a local ISP proactively filter against infringement. Apparently, SABAM didn't limit this strategy just to ISPs, but also brought similar efforts against online sites and social networks, including local social network Netlog. That case followed a similar trajectory, and now the EU Court of Justice has issued a similar ruling noting that an online site can't be forced to proactively monitor for infringement because that infringes on too many other rights. The court's press release (pdf) is worth reading:

In the main proceedings, the injunction requiring the installation of a filtering system would involve monitoring all or most of the information stored by the hosting service provider concerned, in the interests of the copyright holders. Moreover, that monitoring would have to have no limitation in time, be directed at all future infringements and be intended to protect not only existing works, but also works that have not yet been created at the time when the system is introduced. Accordingly, such an injunction would result in a serious infringement of Netlog’s freedom to conduct its business since it would require Netlog to install a complicated, costly, permanent computer system at its own expense.

Moreover, the effects of that injunction would not be limited to Netlog, as the filtering system may also infringe the fundamental rights of its service users - namely their right to protection of their personal data and their freedom to receive or impart information - which are rights safeguarded by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. First, the injunction would involve the identification, systematic analysis and processing of information connected with the profiles created on the social network, that information being protected personal data because, in principle, it allows those users to be identified. Second, that injunction could potentially undermine freedom of information, since that system might not distinguish adequately between unlawful content and lawful content, with the result that its introduction could lead to the blocking of lawful communications.

Consequently, the Court’s answer is that, in adopting an injunction requiring the hosting service provider to install such a filtering system, the national court would not be respecting the requirement that a fair balance be struck between the right to intellectual property, on the one hand, and the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or impart information, on the other.

Here's another good court ruling against the massive overreach of the entertainment industry, as they seek to bend and break the internet so that it acts more like how they want it, rather than how everyone else wants it to work.

from the this-still-looks-more-like-'rent'-than-a-'license' dept

It's been a rather quiet few months for SABAM, the Belgian music royalty collection agency perhaps best known (around here, anyway) for its outlandish tactics, including attempting to charge truck drivers a licensing fee for listening to the radio in their cabs and collecting fees for completely fictional bands.

The music group is claiming 3.4 percent of Internet subscriber fees as compensation for the rampant piracy that they enable through their networks.

SABAM pulls this 3.4% figure from an interesting source:

Sabam base their claim on a provision in the Copyright Act of 1994, which states that authors should be paid for any "public broadcast" of a song. According to Sabam, downloads and streams on the Internet are such public broadcasts, and they are therefore entitled to proper compensation. This 3.4 percent share is the same amount as the copyright fees on cable television.

Of course, this just means that all internet users, whether they infringe or not, will be charged extra for their internet service. Not only that, but a 3.4% flat rate assumes every transmission over the internet involves copyrighted material under SABAM's control. And SABAM has made it clear that, although it is using this fee as some sort of "piracy license," it is by no means saying that all users are now free to start (or resume) pirating content.

But even in the event they begin to receive payments, Sabam stresses that any compensation would by no means legalize piracy. The license fee is only meant to legitimize the ISPs part in transferring these unauthorized files.

Of course, this sort of action, if approved, would open the doors for nearly every other group of rights holders to pile on, turning the Belgian internet service into an incredibly expensive luxury, one that punishes the entirety of the population for that actions of a minority.

Even worse, it appears that SABAM is only pushing this "license" forward because it would rather just collect money than explore new options:

The decision of the music rights group to claim a share of subscriber fees comes after they were unable to reach a workable solution in direct talks with ISPs. The ISPs say they would rather focus on offering legal alternatives than quibble over piracy, a point also noted by Minister of Economy Vincent Van Quickenborne.

“The timing is unfortunate, just as Belgacom and others come to the market with a range of legal streaming services,” a spokesman for the Minister said, adding that his department would look into the legal issues.

This is just another example of the "take it out on the ISPs" thinking that tends to rise to the surface way too often with certain rights holders. Ultimately the costs will be passed on to the end user, which turns this from "us vs. the ISPs" into "us vs. our customers," and is that any way to build a relationship?

from the make-it-stop dept

Over the last few years, we've noted that various collection societies around the globe have become both more aggressive and more ridiculous in trying to get people to pay licensing fees for listening to music. Among the crazy stories that have popped up are cases of collection societies demanding cash from a woman who played music for her horses in a stable, a police station told to pay up because some police officers had a radio on and the public entering the station could hear it, hotels being told they need to pay an extra performance license because guests listen to radios in their rooms and, of course, the claim that ringtones (even legally licensed ringtones) require another license as a public performance. In some cases, these societies apparently hire people to just call up businesses and if they hear music in the background, they demand payment.

This seems pretty extreme, even by traditionally insane collection society standards. Most of them admit that they only seek to collect fees in cases where the public might hear the music. Going after truck cabs seems beyond ridiculous -- and thankfully some in the Belgian Parliament seem to agree, with one MP saying, "it's utter nonsense." Still, SABAM seems to be standing by their right to collect in such cases, perhaps not realizing what an incredible laughingstock this makes them, and how it just makes people respect copyright less and less when such stories get out.

from the stay-classy dept

We've seen all sorts of ridiculous actions from various music collection societies over the past few years -- from PRS trying to charge a woman who played the radio for her horses to ASCAP claiming that a legally licensed ringtone also should require another license for being a "public performance." Apparently a satirical TV show in Belgium decided to see how far they could push the Belgian collection society, SABAM. While SABAM chose not to charge them for a ringtone "performance," it did send them invoices when they said they were going to have totally made up bands performing made up songs. Neither the bands nor the songs were actually covered by SABAM since they didn't actually exist. Yet, the invoices still came:

Making a telephone call to SABAM from a public toilet, a Basta team member looked at the manufacturer of a hand dryer and explained that Kimberly Clark would be performing at an upcoming event. That would cost 134 euros minimum said SABAM.

Next the playlist. What if Kimberly Clark sang songs not covered by SABAM? Titles such as 'Hot Breeze', 'Show Me Your Hands', 'I Wanna Blow You Dry', 'I'm Not a Singer I Am a Machine' and the ever-timeless, 'We Fooled You', for example.

Five days later the answer came from SABAM. All of the songs were "100% protected" and so Basta must pay 127.07 euros.

Concerned that this might be a one-off mistake, the Basta team tried again, this time taking brand names of products from the supermarket including Suzi Wan, the name of a Chinese food wok kit, Mister Cocktail and the Party Mix, which is a hybrid of a drink and some party food, and Ken Wood, the food mixer.

They got bills from SABAM for these 'artists' totalling more than 540 euros.

The group who did all this, Basta, then wondered who was getting all of this money, so it took the food they used in that second experiment and brought them to SABAM offices to sign up to collect their money. No such luck. Though, once exposed, SABAM found it in their hearts to return the money.

There are some other amusing parts to the show, including a fun bit that mocks SABAM's inability to understand zero. Apparently, the fees for parties are based on venue size, and the smallest size range is for places that range from 1 - 100 square meters. So, Basta set up a party in 0.99 square meters, and told SABAM about it. Rather than recogizing the put on, SABAM insisted that the "1" really meant "0" and handed them an invoice for 82 euros.

Nice to see collection societies around the globe living down to their reputations.